Twisting Light

Composer Anna Clyne and sound designer Jody Elff will create Twisting Light, a new symphonic work inspired by the research of MIT assistant professor of physics Anna-Christina Eilers, whose work focuses on the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes in the early universe. The piece will be composed in seven movements, each reflecting a different phase of a black hole’s life cycle: from its origins in a collapsing star through turbulent gas accretion to the gravitational waves released by mergers.

Twisting Light will employ the Augmented Orchestra, a technology Clyne and Elff have developed that extends orchestral sound through real-time electronic transformation, allowing the music to reach frequencies and textures beyond the range of acoustic instruments. Previous implementations include PALETTE, a concerto for Augmented Orchestra which premiered at Lincoln Center in 2025, and commissions for the BBC Proms and the San Diego Symphony.

The residency comprises two visits, the first from May 4 to 11, 2027, featuring workshops and open rehearsals with the MIT Symphony Orchestra under Director Adam Kerry Boyles. Clyne and Elff will also join Eilers on an observing trip to the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, gathering raw materials—data, imaging, and recorded sounds—to guide the composition. The project will culminate in a public work-in-progress performance in fall 2027, with the first complete concert performances anticipated in 2028–29 by an international group of orchestras to be announced.

Anna Clyne is a Grammy-nominated and Ivor Novello Award-winning composer, described by The New York Times as a “composer of uncommon gifts and unusual methods,” by NPR as “fearless,” and by The Wall Street Journal as possessing a “rare gift.” Clyne is one of today’s most in-demand composers, working internationally with leading orchestras, choreographers, filmmakers, and visual artists. She has been named as the most-performed living woman composer in the world by Bachtrack.

Clyne’s music has been commissioned and presented by major institutions, including the Barbican Centre, Carnegie Hall, the Edinburgh International Festival, MoMA, the New York Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Sydney Opera House. Collaboration is central to her work: she has partnered with a wide range of leading artists, including Martin Fröst and Yo-Yo Ma, and her music has been choreographed for San Francisco Ballet and The Royal Ballet by Nicolas Blanc and Pam Tanowitz, respectively.

Clyne’s music has been featured in major international events and ceremonies, including performances at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the Nobel Prize awards ceremony in Sweden. She has held residencies with many major orchestras worldwide, such as the BBC Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Recordings of her works on Sony Classical are wide reaching, and her cello concerto, DANCE, has garnered over 12 million plays on Spotify.

Visual art also plays a significant role in Clyne’s work. Several compositions are inspired directly by painters such as Julie Mehretu, Gerhard Richter, and Mark Rothko; in PALETTE, she created a series of original abstract paintings to accompany each movement of the work. She is also known for integrating technology into orchestral performance, notably through the development of the Augmented Orchestra with sound designer Jody Elff.

Clyne’s music is published exclusively by Boosey & Hawkes. Biography used with kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.

Website: annaclyne.com
Social: Facebook | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

Jody Elff is a Grammy Award–winning audio engineer, sound artist, and designer. Elff has mixed countless televised network concert events. His orchestral collaborations include the LA Philharmonic and the Lincoln Center Festival. He has made field recordings of folk music in Morocco and Ethiopia, and his work with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble includes recording three albums and sound design for hundreds of performances around the world. He is the founder and owner of Little Dog Live, a pioneer in high-fidelity live-streaming services. His corporate design work includes site-specific sound installations for Target and Turner Networks. Elff’s fine art sound works have been presented at museums and galleries internationally, including collaborations with David Lang and Diller Scofidio + Renfro on Musings on a Glass Box at the Foundation Cartier and The Mile-Long Opera. He was commissioned to create a sound installation, Strata, which is permanently on display in Lyon, France. 

In 2018–19, Elff was the audio engineer for Michelle Obama’s Becoming international book tour, and began 2020 with Oprah Winfrey’s 2020 Vision tour. Throughout 2020, during the pandemic, Elff aggressively developed many new technologies for working with high-quality audio over distances. This new technology has since been utilized on broadcasts with Yo-Yo Ma and James Taylor and on projects for Audible, Netflix, and iHeart Country, among others.

Website: elff.net

Observational astrophysicist Anna-Christina Eilers is an assistant professor in MIT’s Physics Department and leads the MIT Cosmic Dawn Group. Her research investigates how black holes form and evolve across cosmic time, exploring their origins and the role they play in shaping the universe. Eilers is particularly interested in the Cosmic Dawn of our universe—the epoch when the first stars, galaxies, black holes, and quasars began to emerge. 

Eilers uses a combination of multi-wavelength observations from telescopes around the world and in space, cosmological simulations, and new machine learning models. She is heavily involved in multiple programs using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is piercing deeper than ever before into the distant past of our universe.

Biography: MIT Physics Department
Website: MIT Cosmic Dawn Group

For nearly two decades, Adam Kerry Boyles has been a notable figure in the musical life of New England. He is currently director of orchestras at MIT and assistant conductor of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. 

Biography: MIT Music
Website: adamboyles.com

Anna Clyne, composer

Jody Elff, sound designer and live electronics software developer

Anna-Christina Eilers, assistant professor of physics at MIT 

Adam Kerry Boyles, director of the Orchestras at MIT and assistant conductor of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra 

David Nadal, editor

Twisting Light is supported with a 2026–27 Visiting Artist Grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology and co-presented with the MIT Music Technology Program and MIT Music Section.